3 Ways of increasing your productivity/efficiency in Hammer

Each function has its place in Hammer and some are more useful than others. But i could not live without these 3 and encourage others to utilise them too.

A) I'm a format freak. When things fuck up for me 99% of the time it's because i wasn't organised. Visgroups make it significantly easier to control and view portions of your map at a time and allow you to work on multiple pieces of work at a single location, such as working on 3 different aesthetic resolutions to a single building.

B) Centre 2d views. Simply put, using this function saves you orienteering in your grid windows to where you are currently working. Select your brush, CTRL+E, nuff said.

It saves seconds at a time, but seconds add up. This could easily double your productivity.

C) This one is simply for people who cannot comprehend their compile logs at a mere glance. Personally, and is the case for many individuals who have worked with this software for years, one can pick up on tell tale error signs simply through experience and familiarity of compile logs. But for most people they do not discover problems with their maps until they have run them in TF2 and noticed something a'miss (such as low performance, poor lighting or a non-updated .bsp).

This is particularly helpful when dealing with simultanious/trial and error bug fixing, running the point file after every compile is the sure fire way of making sure your map compiled properly before taking the time to run HL2.exe and getting ingame. You can resolve several seperate leaks in the time it would take you to open TF2 and load your map once.

You can also hit Alt-Enter when you have any number or type of objects selected, hit the visgroups tab, and check or uncheck the whole bunch to assign or unassign them to particular existing visgroups.

ctrl+e is excellent, but did you know that ctrl+shift+e is the 3d version?
Other helpful tricks are:*cough**cough*
hold space and click and drag to pan quicker
use ctrl+t to quickly func_detail stuff
tap z to enter noclip mode
shift+drag a brush to duplicate it
ctrl+b to snap to grid
ctrl+shift+b to snap each object to the grid individually
shift+a to texture
use the brackets '[' ']' to resize the gridDimensions

Went a bit off topic there, reiterated some common knowledge, but may have helped someone out somewhere!

I think the most useful feature by far is nudging. If you go to Tools>Options>2D views and select "arrow keys nudge selected object/vertex" then the arrow keys will move objects by the grid size. Works in 3D view as well, and you can clone nudge!

I think it's worth mentioning that one of the best ways to increase productivity in hammer is to plan properly before even opening it, and to prioritise tasks. The number of times I used to go off on little detail binges when gameplay areas were unfinished is silly, don't do this it's a bad habit, write lists and work through them.

I just wish that the keyboard shortcuts didn't use a modifier. A bit like the QWERTY shortcuts in Maya. That would really help productivity, as well as dedicated 'mapping' and 'texturing' layouts. Maybe there is a third party program that can do just that.

I think it's worth mentioning that one of the best ways to increase productivity in hammer is to plan properly before even opening it, and to prioritise tasks. The number of times I used to go off on little detail binges when gameplay areas were unfinished is silly, don't do this it's a bad habit, write lists and work through them.

That's my two cents on the subject.

Click to expand...

That's just self discipline :/ of which i am dreadful at.

Still, it doesn't take much to create a layout. Even the most complicated layout could probably be done in a day.